Paul Ivan Yakovlev

Paul Ivan Yakovlev (December 28, 1894 – June 16, 1983) was a Russian-American neuroanatomist who worked at Harvard Medical School. He is the namesake of the Yakovlevian torque, an asymmetry of human brains. He made contributions in the origins of the frontopontine tract in humans, neurocutaneous syndromes and epilepsy, neuronal substrates and epilepsy, schizencephaly, arhinencephalia, intellectual disability, decussation of the bulbar pyramidal tract, frontal lobotomies, the limbic cortex, the time of myelination and the anatomy of the limbic cortex, corpus callosum, and thalamus, and two classic anatomical atlases.

Biography Yakovlev was born in Vitebsk Region, Belarus, in what was then the Russian Empire. Orphaned at the age of nine, he was raised by an aunt and then attended S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. Until he was able to obtain a travel visa he made ends meet by working as a dockhand. He earned his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1925. and created a collection of "stained serial sections of whole brain" that remains a research resource in the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C. He was known to joke that the collection was "40 tons of glass."

Yakovlev and Maurice Victor collaborated on a translation of Sergei Korsakov's writings. They were the parents of four children, three daughters and a son. Yakovlev died in Takoma Park, Maryland and was buried in Bellevue Cemetery, Harvard.